Google AdSense Optimization Tips For Better Revenue & Better UX

Google AdSense Optimization Tips For Better Revenue & Better UX

Google AdSense is the most widely used ad product used by publishers across the web. Due to its wide availability, it has increased Google’s ability to further attract top advertisers to its platform. This means that AdSense has remained a powerful ad monetization tool for most publishers.

However, due to the complex nature of the ad ecosystem, many publishers are often missing best practices and other Google AdSense optimization tricks on their websites.

Researchers have estimated that nearly 80-90% of AdSense users are lacking some of the most common optimization tips and best practices. Below, I’ll outline what these are and how to implement them in your AdSense account.

The best way to start is by doing a FAQ around some of the most common terms and questions AdSense publishers ask.

I’ll start here and provide advanced insights to those who may be looking for a more detailed edge in how they monetize their web properties with AdSense.

What is Active View CPM?

Active View CPM is when at least 50% of an ad is displayed on the screen for 1 second. This is important to publishers; as it is a core metric advertisers use for determining viewability.

The goal of a publisher should be to balance visitor engagement, visitor behavior, and ad earnings. These things need balance to ensure a proper experience for visitors and positive overall outcome for advertisers long-term.

In fact, research shows that user experiences may be the paramount factor in total publisher ad earnings.

Google AdSense optimization best practices

According to Google, publishers should seek to blend, complement, and contrast ads and content on the page.

When customizing ad styles in AdSense, use colors that already exist on the site, but don’t match backgrounds and borders. Choose colors that stand out against the background.

Maximize your ad space with multiple ad units. There is a large inventory of ads types, styles, and sizes that can be displayed. Limiting these selections to what you “think” may work best could be limiting ad earnings, and also negatively impact visitors.

What are the most popular AdSense ad sizes?

The most popular AdSense ad sizes are not necessarily the ones that are best for revenue and user experience; however, they often have some of the largest competition for advertisers for fill space. These includes:

Turn on the filters you think might improve experiences for visitors, measure bounce rates, time on site, and pageviews per visitor better yet engagement time. Then, turn off all the filters and measure again.

Let objective data tell you about the effectiveness of AdSense advertiser filters to improve visitor experiences.

Ensure Google policy compliance and avoid long-term issues

Do not disguise ads. Keep ads looking like ads. Being deceptive about where ads are placed (i.e. close to buttons and navigation) will generate false clicks; which can lead to you getting banned.

Furthermore, make sure you don’t encourage accidental clicks.

I’ve seen users banned in AdSense for telling visitors, in a tongue-in-cheek format, to support the site and click some ads.

Make sure the site is easy to navigate. Navigation plays a huge role in both the quantity and quality of pageviews generated from each user session.

We did some tests on website redesigns and found that usability optimizations generally end up being way better investments of time.

Adding AdSense Search for search monetization

A lot of publishers fail to leverage the AdSense Search monetization feature inside of AdSense.

It’s as easy as adding the AdSense search box to your sites pages (or maybe even just your homepage).

Some publishers see increased ad earnings from adding this feature to their websites. AdSense Search allows publishers to earn a percentage of revenue from search ads that generate revenue from searches that occur from the installed Google search boxes on the publisher’s page.

Placing this in the publisher’s navigation bar is typically one of the best ways to do this.

Testing is what really increases AdSense ad earnings

Understanding which users prefer A and which users prefer B inside of a test presents publishers with a terrific proposition. Give visitors that performed better with A (bounced less, generated more ad earnings) result A, and give the visitors that performed best with B result B.

Data suggests that less testing and more visitor segmentation is actually more helpful than lots of testing with static implementation… meaning, don’t test something and then deliver everyone the same thing.

About The Author

Tyler is an award-winning marketer, SEO expert, successful blogger, and keynote speaker. He has composed content for some of the world's top publications and has over a decade of experience building businesses in the digital space. Tyler is the current Head of Marketing at Ezoic and serves as an SEO and marketing expert for start-up competitions across the U.S.

I got shafted by Google. The first time I applied for adsense I was approved in less than 24 hours. Fast forward 2 months and I purposely cancelled the account so that I could change my country and payment settings.

Since then my applications keep getting rejected, although the site hasn’t changed (apart from regularly adding new content).

1. Since December 2017 I started seeing most of Google Ads disappearing, only left white space instead. That drastically dropped my revenue down to 80% lower. Ads are being shown on very popular pages only, like front page. How can I overcome this? Is it something that needs to be optimized?

2. How about the newer auto ads? I see a much lower CTR with auto ads enabled, which led me to think that Google AI is pretty dumb right now.

Auto Ads has gotten very poor reviews. Obviously, at Ezoic, we see them as a crude solution to a complicated challenge (balancing UX and revenue).

As for white space, check the ability for Google to crawl those pages, and also check for objectionable content on those pages. It sounds like ads are suspended on many of your pages…. either Google isn’t/can’t crawl them (they won’t show ads on pages they don’t crawl) or… they have been excluded due to content (in which case you should have some warnings)

I want to ask some questions: – What do you think about adsense auto ads..? Should we use it or just stay manual..? One of your article said that sticky ads (anchor) are bad for broad implementation, so adsense auto ads (anchor) kinda bad or no? – Also auto ads (vignette) isn’t that not suitable for “Better ads standard”..?https://www.betterads.org/mobile-prestitial-ad/ – (If we must choose) High ctr with low cpc or low ctr with high cpc, which is better..?

1.) AdSense auto ads have been proven to be a pretty terrible technology — I’m rarely this honest about these kinds of things— but, it looks like they do far more long-term damage than good (hurting ad rates long term). It seems self-serving, but if you want to improve user experiences by auto-adjusting ads, Ezoic is light years ahead of anything else you could ever consider.

2.) Interstitial ads on mobile are against IAB standards

3.) There is no better or worse in what you are discussing. You should really be looking at EPMV (session revenue) and visitor engagement. EPMV is the ultimate guiding light for revenue and authentic visitor engagement is a true north for ensuring that you’re improving ad rates over time (as engagement is directly tied to ad rates over time).

Thanks, Tyler Bishop, for this nice and informative article on Google AdSense optimization tips. You are very correct about the color code. Many publishers try to blend background color but I believe background color should be standout so that ad looks like an ad. Moreover, Google has introduced Auto ads. Can you please put some lights on this AI technology? Is this tech going to help a publisher to earn more? I am confused about the implementation. Though I have tried sometimes but didn’t get much improvement than the traditional one. Once again I thank you for this amazing content.